Paul T. Layland 05.17.07 Laura Ceia-Minjares Thursday 5:00 PM

A HALF-FORMED FEMALE The Problem of Nikita

“The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world.” - Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Mulvey 6) Writer-director Luc Besson, one of the most high-profile directors of the last twenty years, has made his name by employing a rarely seen character – the female action hero. A catalog of his strongest heroines produces a list of his most-seen and admired films: “Mathilda” from The Professional, “Leeloo” from The Fifth Element, “Joan of Arc” from The Messenger, and the first of his action heroines – Nikita. Nikita, released in 1990, is often seen as revolutionary cinema, as it “broke the commercial taboo against female-driven action movies” (Keogh). However, when one delves deeper into the structure and visual style of the film, it becomes clear that what seemed to be a leap forward for female representation in film is actually a rehashing of the same patriarchal ideologies that have persisted in cinema since its birth. To put it bluntly, Luc Besson’s Nikita cannot withstand a feminist critique. In order to understand the gender line that Nikita plays, it is first necessary to provide a short (albeit cursory) examination of how the female gender is traditionally represented in film. Most films employ a male main character, through which the audience is invited to see the world. This is no accident, as it is a method to reinforce patriarchal values and the ideology of Woman as The Other in society. Molly Haskell

notes that “it is man’s prerogative to follow the path from blindness to discovery, which is the principle movement of fiction” (Haskell 562). Through this lens, we are often invited to eroticize the female characters, as the main character does. There are exceptions to this eroticized rule, of course, but even without being eroticized, the roles women are often given (mother, sister, friend) are always secondary. At no point must a female character be given agency, given the ability to be a “maker of meaning” (Mulvey 7), as that would detract from her value as a spectacle, and further, would threaten the value of the male protagonist with his own agency. In this way, traditional film narrative serves to underline the status quo, a tool that is used with more subtlety since the sexual revolution, but it still used nonetheless. Nikita proves to be no exception. Dissecting Nikita using the three-act plot structure reveals the broad strokes that paint Nikita into an eroticized and “othered” corner. Susan Hayward notes, in her article on the film, that “in the first episode she goes from child to woman; in the second she is represented as agencing desire,” but that in the end “she devolves from woman back to child” (Hayward 298). Now, taken alone this plot structure does not imply marginalization, but it is clear in watching the film that the first two acts imply a call to agency that the third act does not fulfill. In fact, writer-director Luc Besson, who shot the film in chronological order, is known to have changed the ending of the film while shooting. His reasons for doing so, especially since the original ending would have given Nikita agency and power over her destiny, prove to be highly rationalized highly suspect. The first act of Nikita falls very neatly into a Pygmalion model. Our wild heroine is saved from execution by the secret police, specifically an older man (“Bob,” in the Henry Higgins role), taught how to become a professional killer and, interestingly

enough, taught how to be a refined woman. Bob teaches her to become what The State (a patriarchal organization) requires of her, and Amande (the only other female presence) teaches her femininity, only because it will prove useful to the same State (“There are two things that are infinite: femininity and means to take advantage of it”) (Nikita). Here, she most certainly does not have agency, but as this is the first act, and even a male hero may not have agency, this circumstance is understandable. However, the scene that transitions Nikita into the second act is startling in its subjugation of the main character. Marking the first time Nikita has been outside The State’s walls in three years, Bob takes our heroine out for her birthday (which Hayward refers to as a “celebration of identity”) (Hayward 299), but when they reach the restaurant, the “gift” Bob has for Nikita is not a celebration of her accomplishment and importance as an individual, but a gun with which to carry out her first mission for the State (a concept that is represented by Bob and other firm male voices). Nikita, who is obviously distraught at the lack of human connection between her and Bob (which will come into play later), cries before carrying out her mission in a little black dress, heels, and makeup that make her out to be, not a capable killer with agency, but a “wandering fetish” (Hayward 300). She proceeds to kill numerous people in this eroticized state. As Nikita proceeds to kill more and more people for The State, which is the bulk of the second act, she is further eroticized. She kills as a maid (an obvious fetishistic symbol), she uses a sniper rifle to kill someone while wearing only underwear, and on her last job, she must seduce a man in order to carry out the mission (Nikita). This falls neatly into Mulvey’s idea that even when women are given pivotal, iconic roles, they still must be forced to meet an Other model. “The woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and

enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified” (Mulvey 8). The implication here is that the empowerment of a female character inherently “castrates” the male viewer by rendering moot the necessity of his maleness. Confronted with this dilemma, one of the choices the male has is “complete disavowal of castration by turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star)” (Mulvey 8) Besson must have realized during filming that the traditional eroticized filmic treatment of the female, which he was perpetuating, was in conflict with the empowering ending he had originally scripted. The main conflict of the second act is the precariousness with which Nikita balances the desires of The State with her desire to live a normal life with her boyfriend Marco. In the original ending, which Besson referred to as a “Rambo-esque” bloodbath (Hayward 301), Nikita finally begins to exact revenge on her captor/employers by turning her guns on the State when they come to her apartment to arrest her. In the ensuing gunfight, her love Marco dies, which helps motivate her to take revenge on Bob and his compatriots for their original trespass – rejecting her identity and agency. Now, this plotline would be incredibly satisfying for a male action hero, but it would seem that in Besson’s eyes, carrying this out would undermine the “love triangle” plot that Besson had created between Nikita, Bob, and Marco. Near the end of the second act, when Nikita and Bob are meeting for the last time, Bob says “I miss the time when I had you to myself every day” (Nikita). This not only underlines the sexual tension between Bob and Nikita, but also communicates the dangerous possessiveness that Bob has towards Nikita. In the original ending, Nikita

would eventually prove to Bob that she is not a possession by defying his authority and the State’s, especially when he and his cronies have caused the death of her love (Hayward 302). But in the new ending, she does something curious of an action hero – she literally runs away. She has just botched a job in which Victor the Cleaner was sent in to apply brute, male force and fix everything. Having found that she is not fit for the killing life (through failure and not personal empowerment), she leaves Marco with some documents to give to Bob, and disappears off the face of the earth. Also, in and odd move for a film centered around her, Nikita is not even present in the last scene. We are instead left to hear Bob and Marco talk about how they were both in love with her, placing her as an object of desire and eroticism and not of agency. The fact that Besson thought this ending better reveals that, as Hayward said, he believed “that the love-triangle/story is more important than the trajectory she might have been on” (Hayward 302). And also, that “Nikita must remain agent and, therefore, victim of the state and not subject of her own violence (as she was at the beginning of the film)” (Hayward 305). Nikita is objectified, even in her own film. “What we have in Nikita's case is a successful operation in which the patient dies. In the film's second half, all her demons have been put to sleep, but because there's very little satisfaction seeing this wild spirit broken, our involvement is broken too.” -

Hal Hinson, Washington Post review of Nikita (Hinson)

This third act redirection would be a jarring and unrealistic if it were not supported by the visual style of the film, which vehemently treats Nikita as an object, and not subject. Even though during the first act Nikita chose her own name at the police station, while under the male control of the state, she ends up having three different

names, effectively robbing her of a real identity. Choosing an actress (Anne Parillaud) who looks more like a starving supermodel than a physically-capable (athletic) woman is the first clue as to the filmmaker’s intent. Mulvey notes that her male hero counterpart is not nearly as glamorous because he is not the object of the gaze, and can represent “the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror” (Mulvey 15). Besson is even on record as preferring female main characters not because of some wish for female equality, but because they’re “weakness” causes them to have to find other ways to fight that are “more interesting” (Jobson). Thus, even as the star of the film, Nikita purposefully stands as a signifier for The Male Other. She is characterized by emotionality and weakness, shown throughout the film by Nikita’s constant crying before or after her hits. In every way, Nikita is fashioned to be a woman without an identity who is a harmless male fantasy of a fetish. An androgynous woman holding a gun is a threat to the male order, but a skinny, beautiful female wearing a tiny skirt and brandishing a gun too big for her reaches the point of parody. Even told with a straight face, this codified representation of male fantasy both eroticizes the main character (dressing in a way not fit for a hitman) and marginalizes her (barely able to hold up a gun a man could easily hold). The male gaze is encouraged to have its cake and eat it, too, given a both phallic symbol and a female object of scopophilic pleasure in the same frame. As such, when Besson was reconsidering the shoot-em-up ending he had originally planned, he was probably unconsciously realizing that he hadn’t made an action movie with a woman, he’d made an exploitation picture.

If there is any defense for Besson’s marginalization of his own main character in Nikita, it’s that for a member of the hyper-stylized eighties movement known as Cinema du look, the eroticization of the entire image – from sets, to characters, to technology – takes precedent over respecting any sort of revolutionary film ideas. Indeed, this is the simple reason that Besson uses so many women in prominent roles in his films: the patriarchal societies that comprise his audience will more easily accept an eroticized female than a male. Of course, this is a cop-out. Nikita’s impressive box office numbers can justify its existence as a commodity, but its ideological stance cannot justify it as a relevant piece of filmmaking. Laura Mulvey has it right when she says that, in order for future filmmakers to have a greater ability to tell honest and fair stories, “the satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film theory hitherto must be attacked” (Mulvey 7)

Works Cited

Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1974. pp. 562-575. Hayward, Susan. "Recycled Woman and the Postmodern Aesthetic: Luc Besson’s Nikita." French Film: Texts and Context. Ed. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau. Second Edition. London: Routledge, 2002. pp.297-310. Hinson, Hal. "La Femme Nikita." The Washington Post 04 April 1991: Arts Section. 09 May 2007 . Jobson, Richard. "Luc Besson Interviewed." Guardian Unlimited 23 March 2000: Film Section Keogh, Tom. "La Femme Nikita – Product Description." Amazon.com. 2007. Amazon, Inc. 10 May 2007 Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16.3 (1975): pp. 6-18. Nikita. Luc Besson. Film. Samuel Goldwyn Company/Gamount, 1990.

Paul T

May 17, 2007 - A catalog of his strongest heroines produces a list of his most-seen and admired films: ... value of the male protagonist with his own agency.

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